Building retrofits are plagued by a lack of original design documentation and general uncertainty regarding the building’s envelope composition and integrity. This presentation shows the power of thermography and transient heat transfer modeling to non-intrusively characterize the thermal properties of a building’s envelope to inform energy modeling, facade design, and project appraisal. We will describe methods to characterize existing building envelope thermal properties, followed by a preliminary methodology to identify representative thermal properties for an existing building envelope.

Research into the next generation of simulation tools and techniques is being carried out at universities, but much of this information is not transferred to the practitioners. For this SimClub event, graduate students from the University of Colorado-Boulder and the Colorado School of Mines will give short summaries of their current research projects.

Software engineering has a lot in common with building design. A diverse, technical team of individuals work independently on a series of tasks that are intended to lead to an integrated product. This presentation explores techniques used at the micro-level in software which could potentially dramatically improve the effectiveness of engineering teams in building services.

This videos has been free to view for all. This presentation will explore the challenges and opportunities to optimize hospital projects. Shifting energy codes are challenging engineers and architects with a wide array of parameters to balance like energy, cost, daylight, views, and embodied carbon. Many design teams are harnessing simulation to shape the design and details of their projects while optimizing for cost. This is critical now given than hospitals take 7-10 years to be built, todays designs should already be targeting carbon neutral operation. This 60 minute session showcases data driven workflows for full building optimization, tradeoffs, and system integrations to design high performance hospitals.

In this presentation, Krista Palen of Transsolar and Christoph Reinhart of the MIT Building Technology Program will discuss emerging simulation techniques across industry and academia, including applications of daylight, thermal, and natural ventilation simulation.